The Clinton administration has good domestic reasons to raise its profile over Aids in the wider world. It is election year and there are lobbies to placate. Altruistically, US Aids activists have given Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore a hard time over the non-availability of proven therapies in poor countries; Bill Clinton is doing his best to help him. President and candidate have credentials to burnish with black leaders who have made Aids in Africa a focus (and who have been dismayed by president Thabo Mbeki's recent eccentric attempts to downplay its significance).

The $254m budget allocation proposed by the White House is small beer. Anti-Americans will doubtless think it all too typical that Aids proposals are brought under the national security rubric - as if increasing death rates from the disease in Africa and Asia were not fundamental attacks on the security of scores of other countries as well. And yet this classification - on the back of Central Intelligence Agency reports earlier this year - has some merit.

It is enforced recognition that help now offers security later, that international assistance is in the longer-run interests of American taxpayers. Aids is like the weapons conventionally defined as threats to the well-being of nations. It deprives the United States (and the world) of men and women who might grow and prosper and trade; it deprives humanity (and the United States) of rich increments to its stock. Treatment and nursing absorb money and materials in parts of the world where they might spectacularly be turned to other, positive use.

Of course there is an ideological component to American policy. The US wants to see free market societies blossom. They are not likely to when mortality rates are as high as they now are in sub-Saharan Africa. American political interest implies democracy and liberalism in Africa and Asia, for which surely disease-free bodies are a prerequisite. The case for international action on Aids needs no such buttressing; but it does no harm either.

As Mr Gore's own advisers publicly admit, the amount being set aside to fight Aids outside the US is a pittance. It will not necessarily get spent. Nothing can be guaranteed as congressional Republicans struggle for purchase on a possible Bush presidency. Yet with it a start can be made, for example in trying to meet the United Nations' target of a 25% cut in the rate of infections over five years.